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Introducing The Lemmy Overseer (overseer.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/95652

Hey everyone, you may have noticed that some of us have been raising alarms about the amount of spam accounts being created on insufficiently protected instances.

As I wanted to get ahead of this before we're shoulders deep in spam, I developed a small service which can be used to parse the Lemmy Fediverse Observer and retrieve instances which are suspicious enough to block.

The Overseer provides fully documented REST API which you can use to retrieve the instances in 3 different formats. One with all the info, one with just the names, and one as a csv you can copy-paste into your defederation setting. You can even adjust the level of suspicion you want to have.

Not only that, I also developed a python script which you can edit and run and it will automatically update your defederation list. You can set that baby to run on a daily schedule and it will take care that any new suspicious instances are also caught and any servers that cleared up their spam accounts will be recovered.

I plan to improve this service further. Feel free to send me ideas and PRs.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Maybe I'm being stupid, but how does this service actually determine suspicious-ness of instances?

If I self-host an instance, what are my chances of getting listed on here and then unilaterally blocked simply because I have a low active user count or something?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It's based on dynamic count. For now it's a very simple how many users per post there are and each instance can set their own threshold for it.

It's not about few users, it's about a tons of users and no activity. If you have 5000 users and 3 posts, it's likely those are all spam accounts. This is what we're checking for right now.

This is not a manual process currently, but I'm planning to add the possibility to whitelist and blacklist instances manually in the future.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Isn't it trivial for bot farms to just spam posts on their home instance? And how does this handle cases where the number of posts is zero?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Ideally the list of behaviors which trigger suspicion would be expanded over time, yes? Low hanging for first, just because it's easy doesn't mean spammers will program around it unless we check for it.

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